"Gnome 3 has received a lot of disapproval of late, from the Gnome foundation being charged with not taking care of its users, or losing mindshare, to Gnome 3 itself being an unusable mess. I've been using Gnome 3 myself for a few months to sort the truth from the fiction, and to try and understand just how the Gnome foundation expects their newest shell to be used. I will end with some thoughts on how Gnome 3 can be improved. The review will require a fairly lengthy preface, however."

Document oriented or Application oriented desktops are competing ideas. Neither is more advanced. However, there have been advances within each paradigm that make one more palatable (or fashionable) than the other.

I think you're assuming that Gnome 3 is for the tablet (AFAIK, Gnome 3 isn't designed for tablets) and then claiming that you could've used a Gnome 2's ideas for a tablet anyway. I don't think the Gnome guys are trying to win in the tablet space. At least, the idea of Gnome 3 having to evolve to tablets only recently came up, and there probably won't be any real code along that line until past Gnome 3.6.

I tried to explain in the article how one could go about using Gnome 3. Perhaps I didn't do a very good job, but basically, if you can't "do work" in Gnome 3, maybe it would be worth writing down what doesn't work for you in a very specific way, and using that as a basis for criticism. Gnome 3 is minimalist, to be sure, but the idea is to make the user more productive. If this isn't true, the Gnome devs need to know exactly why.

As for why Gnome 3 has changed compared to Gnome 2, I guess I can't really answer that. Why does any free source software change? To scratch an itch.